Disobedience

Paris-based Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging poets at work today; her most recent collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pullitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1998. Notley’s newest work takes as its starting point the poet’s conviction of the necessity of maintaining a state of disobedience against everything, from politics to poetics to feminism. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems, in which one of the main elements is an ongoing fantasy dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible, the despised daily, as well as the unconscious; it also deals with life as a woman in France, turning fifty, and living as a poet and thus being seemingly despised or ignored. Vividly erecting structures of image and feeling that accumulated during this time, these poems reflect the wisdom, passion, loneliness, and strength of a poet’s attempt at not believing, and telling the truth as it comes up.